Tour the Interface

Now that you have set up some sample Elements, in the coming modules, you can perform some common Uptime Infrastructure Monitor tasks using these Elements. However, before continuing, let's have a quick tour of the Uptime Infrastructure Monitor UI from an administrator's perspective. Specifically, take a look at the main panels, whose respective contents center around a particular function

Infrastructure

We are already familiar with Infrastructure, where you manage your Elements by performing actions such as the following:

• organize Elements into Element Groups to facilitate various administrator activities (for example, in one action, you can flag 30 systems as "in maintenance" to prevent alerts from generation)
• organize Elements into Views that ensure different Uptime Infrastructure Monitor users can see the systems they are responsible for (for example, a View consisting of all Linux systems can be viewed by any user in the Linux administration user group; this View could have child Views that further refine the Linux systems by function, and can be viewed by more specialized Linux user groups)
• add Elements to your monitored inventory either manually, or using auto discovery (as you did in the previous module)

As the administrator, this panel is your management center for Elements. There is a complementary panel for the service monitors that are attached to to these systems, and perform the actual monitoring, data gathering, and alerting.

Services 

Uptime Infrastructure Monitor uses a diverse library of service monitors. Service monitors perform various roles:

• collect data from monitored Elements for graphing and reporting
• compare incoming data with configured alert thresholds
• connect to an Uptime Infrastructure Monitor Agent to perform system-level tasks after an alert

A service monitor can be linked to an Element either directly, by manually attaching the former to the latter, or indirectly, by linking higher-level Uptime Infrastructure Monitor objects such as Element Groups (which you first saw when you added a VMware vCenter Server as an Element in the previous modules) and Service Groups (which are groups of service monitors).

It is on this Services panel that you can create and manage any of the out-of-the-box service monitors, as well as search for additional plugin monitors found at The Grid. You can also configure other Uptime Infrastructure Monitor objects that allow you to manage monitoring-related activities:

• bundle a stack of service monitors into a Service Group that can be collectively assigned to Elements
• configure different types of Alert Profiles and Action Profiles that run when service monitors raise alerts 
• indicate hierarchies using Topological Dependencies, to prevent a service monitor on a dependent Element from sending alerts when a parent Element's service monitor is already doing so 
• avoid false positives by defining Maintenance Profiles to indicate when service monitors shouldn't watch Elements for status changes, and Monitoring Periods for when they should

In the next module, you work a bit with service monitors, as well as Service Groups.

Config

The Config panel is where administrators configure the Monitoring Station. For example, in the previous module, you created Global Credentials Settings on this panel to define common configurations to communicate with the Uptime Infrastructure Monitor Agent, your WMI implementation, and SNMP network devices. Similarly, you would define how the Monitoring Station connects other platforms and applications, such as the mail server that sends alerts to users; or whether Uptime Infrastructure Monitor uses your organization's LDAP server to authenticate users; or whether another Uptime Infrastructure Monitor instance that offloads report generation tasks exists. It is also here that you manage the Monitoring Station's internal configuration (for example, which types of collected data are archived, or the number of Java threads are allocated to service monitors).

Users

User access in Uptime Infrastructure Monitor results from the properties of three overlapping constructs: user profiles, user roles, and user groups. It's on this Users panel that you can manage all of these to ensure all Uptime Infrastructure Monitor users are able to see the appropriate parts of the monitored infrastructure, and perform the appropriate types of actions.

In the fourth modules, you work a bit with users and user groups.

Reports, My Portal, Dashboards

The contents of these panels are primarily for Uptime Infrastructure Monitor's end users

The Reports panel is where users can draw on metrics stored in the Uptime Infrastructure Monitor database to generate reports in real-time, or configure reports for scheduled generation and delivery to specific users and user groups (for example, weekly summary reports for managers).

You can generate a couple of reports in the fifth module of this guide.

The My Portal panel is an ideal landing page for users, as it aggregates Uptime Infrastructure Monitor alerts and scheduled reports meant specifically for that logged-in user.

For most users, the Dashboards panel is the heart of Uptime Infrastructure Monitor. Dashboards are templates on which collections of UI gadgets are arranged. These gadgets display historical or real-time data and render it in an interactive manner (for example, click-through for root-cause analysis).

Uptime Infrastructure Monitor comes with a host of core dashboards. The following dashboard examples include the modest number of Elements you added to your monitored infrastructure in the previous module.

Network Dashboard

This Network dashboard summarizes the performance of monitored network devices. As you can see, we have but the single network device we added in the previous module: 

Resource Scan

This Resource Scan dashboard shows resource usage, useful in ensuring available capacity, for physical and virtual server-type Elements. Note the VMware vCenter Server Element you added in the previous module, along with its managed inventory of ESX hosts and virtual machines. 

Global Scan

This Global Scan dashboard is a high-level status indicator of your entire infrastructure, showing resource usage and outages for all Elements. Your Elements are organized by groups, allowing you to click through down to individual Elements. This dashboard, along with Resource Scan, are good examples of how Element Groups and Views can help organize your monitored inventory for end-users. 

Helpful end-user content with dashboards and reports depends on well-organized Elements, service monitors, and users (and more) behind the scenes. In the next module we'll focus on the Infrastructure and Services panels, and learn more about organizing your monitored inventory.